» Disability

I love all these environmentally-friendly groups. They are wonderful examples of the heights of prejudiced stupidity political correctness can lead people to.

The latest bright idea these perfectly mobile people have come up with? Banning plastic grocery bags.

Now, this might not seem such a bad idea on the face of it. They take oil to make, and they’re possibly the most common source of unsightly trash littering the world, not to mention they’re not that biodegradable and are a choking hazard to children.

They also happen to be one of the best inventions for people in wheelchairs.

Music is the product of muses, but it can be a muse in and of itself, a trait that I use a lot - when I’m writing, I’ll have music in the background that I don’t “hear”, but it’s there and keeps the words flowing for example.

Likewise, music can reach into our hearts, shaping our feelings. Soft quiet music helps with meditation, Iron Maiden gets the heart beating.

Back in the depths of time (or at least in ‘Confirmation Of Faith’), I jumped feet-deep into the whole cyber-era with the introduction of the Starwolves to the Legion Universe. One of the devices mentioned was the ‘Halo’, a non-implanted system to allow protagonists to interface with the ships. The ‘Halo’, for those of you who haven’t been keeping up with the latest and greatest developments over the past 750 thousand years of a race of hyper-intelligent artificial sentiences, acted as the analog of Neural Cores, linking the temporary versions of the other implants together to provide a limited emulation of the cybernetic abilities full-blown implants offered.

By now, everyone has likely seen the video of, or at least heard about, the quadriplegic in Florida who was detained by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s department and dumped out of his wheelchair.

What’s less widely publicized in the media is the call in January of 2008 by Rod Liddle in The Times newspaper for people to do precisely what occurred.

It’s astonishing to me, there’s such an uproar about this one case, caught on video, but relatively speaking there is absolutely no practical reaction to Liddle’s column. I can’t understand the reason behind the silence in the UK from all “decent” people, when those same people are so vocal condemning what happened in Florida.

Luntz, Maslansky, is a “Strategic Research” company that does market research, focus groups and the like for corporations and politicians.  We’re signed up for their alerts asking for participants in these research projects, and they come in reasonably regularly.

Imagine our excitement at one received last week, for research being done (presumably) for Fox News:

You will be commenting on the presidential candidates for a cable news network. You will be shown on live television and then will make an appearance on the Hannity and Colmes show. This is your chance to get your opinion on one of the highest rated shows and networks on television and to be seen by millions of people.

Cute …

Hasbro and Mattel try to preserve their copyright of Scrabble, asking Facebook to pull a cloned version of it, and within a day there’s a group with 13,000+ people on it all protesting.

Someone instructs people to go out and assault and kidnap people in wheelchairs, and the response is … crickets chirp.

You’d think there’d be more than a few angry posts on a handful of message boards to the latter topic, wouldn’t you? Or at least something a little more demonstrative. If people can get that hyped up over a game being pulled, you’d think they could at *least* put the same level of collective energy into protesting someone advocating violence.

Some disabilities have obvious effects, some don’t. In either case, it can be hard to explain to someone else just how disabilities can make you feel.

Enter one of *the* best articles on the subject, The Spoon Theory. I’ve been using this ever since I discovered it as a handout to give to people that gives them a better idea of just how draining disability *can* be.

It’s great reading, and handy to use! The rest of the site there’s not too shabby either

No, the title isn’t “disability discrimination”, but “disabled discrimination”.The BBC has a series of (badly written) message boards, one of which is frequented by people with disabilities. A recent thread was started there, entitled “Does disablism work both ways“.

The question was about this new pseudo-word, “disablism”, that has become common on those message boards, and asked if the word also applied to discrimination by people with disabilities towards people who have no disabilities.

As expected, the responses varied from the term being solely applicable to discrimination against people with disabilities, and the more-than-expected comments from one poster that implied discrimination against people without disabilities were “sauce for the gander”.

It appears that I’m not the only one in the universe who’s “too normal” after all. As you can see from a recent BBC News Online article, stupid and totally idiotic prejudice exists within the disabled community as well.

I have to admit, I have absolutely no idea how anyone can sit there and say that someone with no feet and missing half their fingers isn’t “disabled enough” to be a paralympian. I’m pretty sure that the Olympics themselves aren’t going to consider this guy for entry to their games, and now he’s been told he can’t be a paralympian either.

It’s kind of frightening to wonder if I might have blown a recent job interview by being too “normal”.

Most of the time, people seem to be very confused as to how they’re supposed to “behave” around people with disabilities, at least in my experience with someone in a wheelchair at any rate. There’s been such an upsurge in “political correctness” that many people are concerned almost to the level of paranoia as to how to handle talking to disabled people.